Change and Advancement

Marketplaces are rapidly changing. With the dawn of the digital era, the speed of technological advancement has been breaking barriers. And to keep up with the trends business organizations are required to step up their game in all sectors. Not only the production but also other areas of importance such as administration and marketing. 

Marketing: is it a hassle?

No one can deny that coming up with a strategy for effective marketing is the most troublesome of them all. Millions and paid for in-house strategists and more spent on outsourcing the marketing process. And not to mention, technological advancement has further made sure that how hard you market is what matters when it comes to establishing a strong market share.

Even so, it is also arguable that these progressive changes have made the process easier as well. Dozens of new ways of less expensive marketing have emerged with it. Following are some of the widely used marketing platforms which came into being simply because of tech evolution:
1. Television Advertisements
2. Social Media Marketing
3. Email Marketing
4. SMS Marketing

Now, the focus is going to fall on the less appreciated option which is SMS Marketing. But it is filled with potential.

What is SMS Marketing?

Today, everyone has a mobile communication device in their hands. May it be a trendy youngster or a senile older person, everyone owns a mobile phone with a mobile connection. Did you ever come to think that this is an opportunity for you to expand your business and make it known among many? Bulk SMS Marketing has now become, according to research and analysis, one of the most productive and ‘cost-effective’ marketing strategies out there. People undeniably pay attention to an SMS on their phone more than an email in their spam folder. 

Most companies conduct Bulk SMS Campaigns to spread the word about their other promotional activities. SMS marketing now helps in ways which you could not have imagined when the technology of Short Messaging Services began. 

As an example, in Sri Lanka, world-renowned food and beverage companies that have chain restaurants here have started sending out SMSs in bulk informing their customers about their latest promotions, discounts, and events taking place. Educational organizations such as private and government universities have started informing the general public about scholarships, launches of new degree programs, and many more via SMS.

Who provides these SMS services?

This is the tricky part. To send these types of bulk SMSs, an organization needs to get registered with an SMS Gateway Service. Similar to getting registered with a payment gateway service. Organizations have to pay a certain amount per SMS to the SMS Gateway Service. Those services provide you with a web application that allows you to type in your SMS as per your preference and send them to your customers or potential customers as per your requirement.

These SMS Gateway Services in Sri Lanka may differ in price, the quality of service, the level of user-friendliness, and some other factors. Therefore, it is important for an organization to do thorough research on similar services and also to look into the feedback of the previous customers from reliable sources.

Among these SMS Gateways in Sri Lanka, there are relatively new services with great customer service and satisfaction as well as well established services with poor services. Therefore, choosing a service might be a difficult task. That is why it is safer to have a look at the available alternatives before choosing one service, simply based on a single trait.

What can be done via an SMS Gateway in Sri Lanka?

SMS Gateways are not only used for promotions. Following are some of the additional advantages of getting registered with an SMS Gateway Service in Sri Lanka.

Promotional SMS

As it was previously mentioned, SMS can be used as a practical substitute for promotional advertisements on other media which cost hundreds of thousands. This method will effectively reach a record number of customers as well as potential customers for lowest cost. Organizations can promote themselves, their products, discounts and special events through this.

Transaction Updates

If you have enabled a payment gateway on your website, it is very important that you also subscribe to a SMS gateway. When someone’s payment is confirmed and completed, normally an automated text is sent to the number customer has provided. Simple but key tasks like that can be done through an SMS Gateway.

Updates

If an organization wants to send their customers daily or weekly updates on their purchase or even any other kind of update, an SMS Gateway would be a super fast and efficient way. There’s no guarantee that every customer will read an email in their inbox. But they will definitely notice an email. This method can even be used with employees of an organization. So, SMS Gateway works either way. Another example would be delivery services. Many use this currently. Customers can be informed once their order is confirmed, once it is dispatched and even send prections on time of the delivery.

Reminders

For an instance, if there is an assignment due tomorrow or a meeting is scheduled for tomorrow, you can remind the students or the employees by way of an SMS. It is sure to be delivered and it does not end up in a spam folder somewhere.

And surely that is not all. Even though SMS is not the latest technology, there are many methods as to how it could be functionally used during the lifespan of a successful business organization.

Now let us have a look at all the trendy benefits of subscribing to an SMS Gateway.

Simplify the responses

When responding to an advertisement is as simplified as possible, there is a high tendency of improving the engagement rate. SMS’s can include shortened links directing customers to your website or product. That will have an impact on gaining more engagement and customers.

Integration

SMS is a platform which can be integrated with other platforms quite easily. Just adding the link to it is what needs to be done. No special integration technology. It works the same as any other messaging facility but it is more accessible by everyone.

Direct

According to the statistics SMS has 97% read rate within 15 minutes of its delivery to the receiver. It is so far the most direct system of marketing after telephone calls. But it can even be argued that SMS is more direct than even making telephone calls. In a way, it is true because calls are prone to being ignored than SMS. And by research all over the world, it has been proven that 45% of SMS campaigns deliver a very successful return on investment.

Customer engagement

As a result of all this positivity, customers have easy access to your business and therefore, their interest is enhanced. It results in a massive boost in the rate of customer engagement.

Options for customers

You can make the customer feel in control of what they do by adding the option to unsubscribe from the service. You may have seen many promotional SMSs include a “STOP AD” option with a short code. Simply by typing in that code and sending will stop them from receiving more promotional SMS from the particular service. This makes the receiver feel as if their preferences have been actually respected and it also leaves a positive impression of the organization in the receiver.

Inexpensive

Without doubt, this is the main reason why you should select to get the benefit of SMS Gateway Services. As seen before, it is the most inexpensive method of marketing. Think of a television or radio advertisement, you have to pay in six digit amounts. If it is a social media promotion, you have to put in dollars. For the artistic creation of both of those advertisements, you have to spend even more. But sending an SMS costs in cents and there is no expensive artistic work required. All in all, it is the most rewarding compared with the amount of work and expenditure which goes into the other available methods.

We hope that now you get why an SMS Gateway for your business is important. So in summary, number one is that it has been proven to grant you a great ROI. It has a guaranteed record delivery and response rate. It gives you the chance to direct a customer to almost anything directly. It does not cost the customer anything and it is very cheap on your side, so everyone is happy. And at the end of the day you are satisfied and your business is thriving like no other. 

_{Featured image: Sms Vectors by Vecteezy}

We at Notify.lk are also working remotely to keep the important services up and running as usual.

About your accounts, we have decided to stop account suspensions due to the reason of overdue commitment invoices to help you out during this hard time. This relief will be valid until 02 weeks after the island-wide curfew is lifted. 

Please stay at home and follow the official notices you receive day-by-day. Together we can defeat this common enemy.

Stay Safe!
Team Notify.lk

Image source: https://www.ovpm.org/

On the other hand, most of the digitized companies are using SMS alerts to send valuable notifications to their customers to keep their users up to date. They believe it’s the easiest way to reach their customer fingertips. Also, we can see a trend that many startup companies/businesses are trying their best to use new technologies for their business environment.

With everything above in mind, we at Notify.lk provide a great set of tools to improve business and customer relationship. We are always trying to provide the best helping tools (mainly regarding SMS communications) for you to follow the new technology.

Today, we are happy to announce “SMS templates” for you to easily send a transactional SMS to one of your customers just after a contact search. Yes, it means you can send a pre-saved SMS (even messages including shortcodes) in a single click. This feature will save a lot of work for Sri Lankan companies who used to send transactional SMS to their customers using our online dashboard.

How to create a SMS Template

To create a template, navigate to Campaigns -> Message Template from the top menu.

After your click, you will be landing to the Message Template management page. You can create, update or delete message templates within the page. To create a new template, click on the New Template button as shown in the following screenshot.

Then you will prompted to fill the Template Title and the Template Content. To the content, you can use supported shortcodes as you used in our New Campaign page. After providing the content, click on the Save template button to save the template.

Let’s send a SMS using the saved template

Now, you can send SMS using our template. Easy method is to search the contact from Contacts page and then click on the “Message” button for the corresponding contact row.

After clicking on appropriate “Message” button, a popup will prompt you to make two clicks, one to select the template to use (from the list of saved templates, if you have multiple) and to click the “Send now” button. That’s it, you just sent a pre-saved message with two clicks.

Save your template now to start sending SMS in simple two clicks. We are always looking for your feedback about how you feel about our service and the updates. Feel free to email them to our support email. Thank you!

Why the wait?

Yes, it was a long time since we officially launched the SMS gateway service in Sri Lanka. ???? We had to take time for testing and to support unicode content from our routes and also to develop our back-end to support unicode character counts and calculating message costs.

The difference in a unicode SMS

You were able to type 160 characters for the first page of the SMS when typing your regular English texts. But in unicode, it is limited to 70 characters. The reason is, the maximum SMS body length is actually 140 bytes and for GSM-encoded content, one character uses only 7 bits which is why you can use 160 characters. In unicode content, one character uses 2 bytes and which is why we can embed only 70 characters (140/2 bytes) to the message body.

Now using both unicode and our previously released feature Message Templates, you can do great things for your business enhancements with Notify.lk. That’s not all, we are excited that we have a more features lined-up to be released in coming weeks. Stay tuned and using our SMS gateway services for your daily business SMS requirements.

Meanwhile enjoy sending messages with your mother tongue. ????

View the relevant act here: http://bit.ly/2TjVqk2

Which means, you need to pay an additional levy of 25 cents for every message you send with the content regarding a product or service promotion, discounts, offers or any other brand promotion content.

This doesn’t apply for your regular customer alerts, notifications, seasonal greetings and all non promotional messages you send.

According to this new levy introduction, we at Notify.lk will charge you this tax from our internal filtering using the content of your SMS and will be deducted from your balance in the same manner we are charging you the SMS cost. We will indicate you these deductions in the My Campaigns page, and this update will reach you as soon as possible.

Thank you!

Cost for an SMS is calculated based on the number of characters in the particular message text. As an example, if you send an SMS with “Where are you?” as the text, it has 14 characters. One SMS can be 160 characters in length. You can send longer messages using a process called concatenation. We use special characters to join the SMS together and deliver them as one message. Due to the use of characters to join the messages, there are inconsistencies in the length of the following SMS.

Number of pages vs number of Characters

Upto 160 Characters = 1 page
160< Characters = 2 pages
306< Characters = 3 pages
459< Characters = 4 pages

As an example, if you send a message with 161 characters, you will be charged twice of your SMS price because you are sending two SMS pages in your message. Your recipient will receive the message as a single message, but technically if it has more than 160 characters you are sending multiple SMS connected together.

Do spaces and line breaks add to my character count?

Yes, each line break and space adds to your character count.

1 whitespace = 1 character
1 line break = 2 characters

What if I use shortcodes in my messages?

We count the text after any shortcodes being resolved. It’s safe to keep a safe margin by having an estimate of how long the shortcode’s final replacement text will take from your message.

Hope you are now having a good understanding of how we calculate the cost for every single message you send through our API and our campaign dashboard. If you still have any doubts please contact our support team.

What about unicode content?

When SMS messages contain characters not found in the GSM-7 character set, we call it an Unicode SMS. An SMS allows up to 160 characters with the GSM-7 character set, which includes all latin characters (A-Z), digits (0-9), and a few special characters. Unicode can handle any known character but takes more SMS space than GSM’s 7-bit binary code. With that situation, SMS messages with unicode content are limited to 70 characters, and SMS content longer than this will be segmented.

Upto 70 Characters = 1 page
70< Characters = 2 pages
134< Characters = 3 pages
201< Characters = 4 pages

You can make online payments with a few clicks if you have a credit/debit card. If you don’t own any of them, just go with the other offline methods displayed below.

Online Payments

You can pay your generated invoice or top-up your account with easy clicks in a minute with our Sampath bank gateway integration. Please login to the Notify.lk dashboard and go to the Payment Settings page to start the process.

Bank Transfers or Cheque Deposits 

If you are not interested in online payments, you can always make payments with a bank deposit.

Please transfer your funds to the following account and contact us using Live Chat or WhatsApp (+94766444465) with a receipt of proof.

Please note that you need to specify your User ID as the payment reference while you making bank transfers. You may find your User ID on API Key Settings page.

With our WooCommerce add-on, you can set options to send SMS to customers for Pending, Failed, Processing, Completed, On-Hold, Cancelled, Refunded events of customer orders.  In addition, you can turn ON admin alerts to receive an SMS to yourself when your WooCommerce store receives new order. The following guide will help you to understand how to install Notify.LK SMS integration to your already working WooCommerce store.

Installation

Download the plugin from our WordPress plugin repository. The file you are downloading is a WordPress plugin. It can be installed directly on your WordPress installation as a normal plugin installation. In case you don’t know how to install a WordPress plugin,

1. Login to WordPress admin dashboard.
2. Go to “Plugins => Add New”.
3. Click “Upload Plugin” button at the top.
4. Select the downloaded zip file, click “Install Now”.
5. After the upload successful, click “Activate” to activate the plugin.

Setting up the plugin

After installing and activating the Notify.LK WooCommerce Addon plugin, you will see a new tab on the WooCommerce settings page.

Go to the new tab “NotifyLK SMS” to begin setting up the options. First of all, scroll all the way bottom to find the “Notify.lk Settings” section which is where you need to connect your Notify.lk account to your website by entering a User ID and the API key.

You can find User ID and API Key in your API keys page in Notify.lk settings section. And the Sender ID is your pre-approved sender ID. You can view your available sender IDs here in your Sender IDs page in the settings section. If you just registered and didn’t request a Sender ID, you can still send SMS using “NotifyDEMO” sender ID. Just enter it into the field.

Enabling SMS to Order Events

Now you have done the part of integrating your Notify.lk account to your WooCommerce addon. Now let’s configure your SMS options to ask the plugin to send SMS according to your requirement.

Tick the appropriate event which you want customers to be alerted using SMS. To get a detailed description of these WooCommerce order statuses, read their article here.

Now, you have set the plugin to send alerts for several WooCommerce order events. Not only that, you can customize the text your customers are receiving. To do that use the section below.

Default Message is the message users are receiving if the Message field for any event is empty. If you want to change the default text, just fill other fields below the Default Message field. You can use a set of shortcodes which the plugin will automatically convert into appropriate customer or order detail. We have listed the whole list of shortcodes available at the bottom of this page.

Admin Alert on New Orders

To enable admin notifications when a new order placed, use the “Notification for Admin” section. Just tick the enable checkbox and give the admin mobile number which you would like to receive the admin SMS alerts.

Finally, don’t forget to save this options page to keep the settings and things to work as you just opted by filling all above information.

This plugin is developed and maintained by Notift.lk team and you can review the code in our GitHub repository. If you are a developer and would like to contribute adding more features or improving current features, you are welcome to create a pull request. Or if you have any feedback or issues, you can simply contact our support team or create a GitHub issue with the detailed information about the matter.

Happy WooCommercing with Notify! 🙂

As an example, you can integrate Gmail and Notify.LK to receive an SMS when your inbox receives an email. In another case, you can set up to send an automated SMS to your customers when they create a support ticket on your Zendesk or Freshdesk support desk. Following are some of the popular services you may integrate with Zapier.

How to integrate apps with Zapier

You may start integrating Notify.LK Zapier app by clicking here. You may start adding an action by “Choose a Trigger App” to select the action from another app as you creating a normal zap.

As the first step setting up Notify.lk, select the only option Send SMS and click Save + Continue button. After you click the button, you will be directed to the next step where you will have to provide Notify.lk API credentials. Fill all the required information. You may find your API credentials in the API Keys page.

After you fill this form, you are all good to test the integration. Please be sure to provide 100% accurate information so that it will work without any issues. If you have any issues while settings this up, you may contact Notify.lk support team from the support page.

This plugin also comes with a custom phone number field with country flag selection. You may use it or a standard field comes with Ninja Forms plugin.

Installing and setting up the plugin

Download the plugin from the Github repository here. Install the downloaded zip file as a normal plugin on your WordPress website. After installing, go to Settings => Notify for Ninja page and save your API credentials correctly. That’s the only place where you need to provide API information.

Creating Forms with Automatic SMS

We are assuming that you already have Ninja Forms plugin installed on your website. Create your form according to your normal procedure. Please refer to Ninja Forms Documentation if you need instructions on how to create Ninja Forms.

After creating your form, firstly go to Emails & Actions tab (shown in the below screenshot) to setup Notify.lk actions. And then click on the plus (+) button in the bottom-right to add a new action.

After clicking on the plus button, you will see many options to add form actions to the current form. You need to select “Notify.LK SMS” from the list of available actions. It will add your new action to the form and give you a form as shown below, to configure the action.

Phone Number field should be filled with the Field ID of the Ninja Form field which we are retrieving customer’s phone number. You may click on the icon shown in the arrow (1) to select the correct Field ID from a list of available fields.

Also, the Group ID field can be filled with an ID of any Contact Group from your Notify.lk account. By providing a contact group ID into that field, you can assign the contact you are saving or updating to the specified contact group.

First Name, Last Name, and Email Address fields are optional and you may provide them hard-coded or you can use a Field ID by clicking on the icon on them to retrieve a customer filled value for them. Those data will be filled to the contact you are saving or updating.

Arrow (3) is indicating the Message Field, you may use Field IDs there also to add any dynamic value from the customer filled data to your message text.

Phone Number and Message fields are required to fill for the integration to work. You may save the form after filling all the required information.

Testing the Integration

If you provide all information correctly, API information and form action settings, you should receive an SMS right after you fill the form. In case you also need to receive an SMS as an admin while customer receiving his message, you may add another action and fill your phone number to the Phone Number Field. In such cases, admin and the customer will receive the SMS individually according to configurations in both actions.

If you face any issues while integrating Ninja Forms with Notify.lk, you can simply write to us via our Support Page. We are avaialable to assist you in the process.